04/06/2009

Playing to the crowd

From the bits of feedback I've gotten on Savory's initial release on Friday, it seems pretty clear that people want to be able to view rendered PDFs that look "like they're supposed to"

Savory's initial release used a PDF-to-HTML converter that extracts the text from a PDF and turns it into a reflowable ebook. If your PDFs are generated from text by modern tools. this is great. Most PDFs aren't.

Over the weekend, I put together a PDF renderer for Savory build on Poppler and the Kindle's built in Manga support (If you have a .zip or .cbz file full of images, the Kindle will display the images like a book)

For now, every PDF is converted twice. Once to text and once to a set of rendered images. So far, it's working pretty well for me. I'd love some feedback on savory-image-beta-2009-04-06.zip from anyone who's game. Just replace your regular savory image with it and reboot the kindle.

Comments

From the bits of feedback I've gotten on Savory's initial release on Friday, it seems pretty clear that people want to be able to view rendered PDFs that look "like they're supposed to"

Savory's initial release used a PDF-to-HTML converter that extracts the text from a PDF and turns it into a reflowable ebook. If your PDFs are generated from text by modern tools. this is great. Most PDFs aren't.

Over the weekend, I put together a PDF renderer for Savory build on Poppler and the Kindle's built in Manga support (If you have a .zip or .cbz file full of images, the Kindle will display the images like a book)

For now, every PDF is converted twice. Once to text and once to a set of rendered images. So far, it's working pretty well for me. I'd love some feedback on savory-image-beta-2009-04-06.zip from anyone who's game. Just replace your regular savory image with it and reboot the kindle.